Those who have a good memory will remember that almost a year ago, around October 2012, we posted the news of the coming of a new benchmark named Catzilla. The ambitious project of creating a benchmark that should compete with Futuremark's 3DMark lasted longer than anyone expected. It turns out it's not that easy to get a completely new benchmark off the ground. At HWBOT, we were and still are very excited about the benchmark now called "ALLBenchmark". Without having tested too much, it seems to be a 3D benchmark with a lot of influence from system components such as storage and memory. We called it the Aquamark of this generation, referring to the competition it brings to the 3DMark series. Originally, the plan was to integrate the Catzilla ALLBenchmark submissions directly with our site, using our benchmark API functionality. However, that turned out to be a troublesome process.

But we are not yet ready to give up on this benchmark!

Over the past weeks, the staff has been discussing on how to move forward with the benchmark. Both the HWBOT and ALLBenchmark team spent a lot of effort on trying to get the integration to work and giving up on it would mean the loss of so much effort. However, if something does not work out as you want it to work, it is sometimes better to cut your losses and move on. That is exactly what we did. We cleaned up the backend of the benchmark submission code and prepared the following four presets for submission:

Currently none of the four presets will generate points, but we will be closely monitoring the activity rate as well as the feedback from the community on the consistency of the benchmarks. As it requires a paying subscription to run any other preset than the 576p (previously Kitty), this will be the priority preset if we enable points for the benchmark. The rules for the benchmarks have been updated as well; you can find them here.

As a celebratory gesture to get the benchmark going at HWBOT, we have set up a small relaxation competition with ALLBenchmark for this month. The different stages all have their own easy-going limitation and should bring a nice challenge to everyone who wants to play something new. You can find the competition here, "ALLBenchmark July OC Relaxation Contest ". The stages are: